Containment and competition: transgenic animals in the One Health agenda

The development of the One World, One Health agenda coincides in time with the appearance of a different model for the management of human-animal relations: the genetic manipulation of animal species in order to curtail their ability as carriers of human pathogens. In this paper we examine two examples of this emergent transgenic approach to disease control: the development of transgenic chickens incapable of shedding avian flu viruses, and the creation of transgenic mosquitoes refractory to dengue or malaria infection. Our analysis elaborates three distinctions between the One World, One Health agenda and its transgenic counterpoint. The first concerns the conceptualization of outbreaks and the forms of surveillance that support disease control efforts. The second addresses the nature of the interspecies interface, and the relative role of humans and animals in preventing pathogen transmission. The third axis of comparison considers the proprietary dimensions of transgenic animals and their implications for the assumed public health ethos of One Health programs. We argue that the fundamental difference between these two approaches to infectious disease control can be summarized as one between strategies of containment and strategies of competition. While One World, One Health programs seek to establish an equilibrium in the human-animal interface in order to contain the circulation of pathogens across species, transgenic strategies deliberately trigger a new ecological dynamic by introducing novel animal varieties designed to out-compete pathogen-carrying hosts and vectors. In other words, while One World, One Health policies focus on introducing measures of inter-species containment, transgenic approaches derive their prophylactic benefit from provoking new cycles of intra-species competition between GM animals and their wild-type counterparts. The coexistence of these divergent health protection strategies, we suggest, helps to elucidate enduring tensions and concerns about how humans should relate to, appraise, and intervene on animals and their habitats.